Did you know there were Yelp video reviews? Well, there are, and these are cinematic gold.

What would the Yelpiest Yelp review actually look like? With painstaking detail and actual paragraphs, a commenter writes a masterpiece that mentions random friends by first names (the server spilled water on George!), dwells on parking options and plays amateur meteorologist about the weather, then reviews the food as "pretty good," maybe even "delicious." Oh, and there are photos. Dark, blurry, unlabeled photos of maybe a burger? Hard to tell.

Director Dave Green (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) and actor Joe Cobden (Fargo, X Men: Apocalypse, The Vow) were joking about this, mostly about Yelp's "Elite Squad"—the commenters so active they've been nominated then elected to higher review status on the site—when the duo decided they had make the most intense Yelp reviews of all time. They noticed a 12-second video review function that basically no one ever uses, except to record grainy clips of sizzling fajitas and low-lit restaurant interiors. They had to be more over-the-top than that.

To parody the phenomenon, the two actors, who are diehard fans of Jonathan Gold, Los Angeles' esteemed long-time restaurant critic, started flooding the Yelp feeds with videos of their own, under the username Toothpix. They uploaded them to Instagram too. The videos make chefs Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo (Jon & Vinny's, Trois Familia, Son of a Gun, etc.) into puppet stars of a mini-hip hop video, a joke about all the rap that plays on the loudspeakers at their restaurants.

In others, Cobden is meat-sweating through the massive discomfort after a feast at Tito's Tacos or using a lion puppet to strategize parking for Grand Central Market in downtown LA. The shorts are noirs, mysteries, comedies, and action flicks. Some are moody odes to Godard and Truffaut; others are light-hearted jabs at Breaking Bad and Los Pollos Hermanos. And if no one ever saw them, no big deal: "It's just such a relief to do a project where you don't care whether it works or not," says Cobden, who is currently in the process of directing several shorts.

All of the videos are local love letters to Los Angeles and the film and TV tradition that's sustained it. In a way, they're also an homage to Gold, who "champions food as the connective tissue of LA. He cracked open the way that diverse communities come together to break bread," says Green. The idea is that it's almost not useful to watch any of these reviews as a way to determine whether you should go to the restaurant. They're for people who have already been, inside jokes on Instagram—or total hidden treasures as you click through grainy photos on Yelp—about each place and what it means to the restaurant community in LA, where every new restaurant is competing against everything that came before it for the title of hottest! newest! most novel! most creative!

Toothpix is a way for them to work with people and ideas that they miss out on in their high-profile Hollywood day jobs. Here, there's truly no expectation of what one of these videos might look like. Their Instagram only follows Jonathan Gold and only has 620 followers as of this writing—and they love it that way.

Yet they don't leave all of Hollywood behind. They hired a stunt team to help out with the Chengdu Taste video they've been working on. They made it like Transformers for Sichuanese food—an intense short clip to match the intensity of fiery Sichuanese food. They hope to get some food-loving actors, such as Aziz Ansari, in the mix, or even escalate to a helicopter or car chase down the line.

The project keeps them curious about the city they call home: "We're tourists in our own town." When I asked what their friends and family thought about it, they laughed, "We haven't even told anybody about it." Well, until now.